Audio: Salonen’s Violin Concerto

The world première of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Violin Concerto, one of the more potent orchestral works of recent years, took place in the spring of 2009, during the final weeks of the composer’s epochal, seventeen-year tenure as the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Leila Josefowicz was the soloist. I wrote in my review:

According to a program note, it is a kind of musical memoir, with movements suggesting the wondering gaze of a solitary newcomer (“Mirage”), the late-night reveries of a husband and father (“Pulse I”), urban forays with a rock-and-roll beat (“Pulse II”), and a rich, long goodbye (“Adieu”). Josefowicz had the arduous task of standing in for Salonen’s questing self; out of two hundred and fourteen bars in the first movement, the violinist plays busily for two hundred and two. The up-tempo sections generate heat—at one point, a percussionist is instructed to “go crazy”—but what lingers is the bittersweet lyricism of the ending: the violin floats up into the highest reaches of its range, tuned gongs and a harp spell out a faintly chilling ostinato pattern (ticktock, ticktock), the strings unfold a featherbed of memories, and the orchestra comes to rest on a sweetly dissonant chord. Time is running out, the composer seems to say, and I must be going.

With the kind permission of Deutsche Grammophon, we’re streaming audio of a new recording of the concerto, with Josefowicz reprising the solo part and Salonen conducting the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. Following it is “Nyx,” a nineteen-minute orchestral piece composed in 2010, its title alluding to the Greek goddess of night. You can read much more about Salonen in my 2007 Profile, “The Anti-Maestro.” In November, he will lead the Philharmonia Orchestra in performances of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony and Berg’s “Wozzeck,” at Lincoln Center.

Illustration by Lara Tomlin.

Alex Ross has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1993, and he became the magazine’s music critic in 1996.